The Old Journal

My big accomplishment of the day was making it out to a coffee shop in Roseville. I drove for at least twenty minutes to Peete's Coffee & Tea (to escape the black hole of distraction and procrastination called my house), sat near a window and drank a mediocre brew while reading an old journal I kept as part of a school assignment.  I traveled to Turkey in 2005 as part of my college's inaugural study abroad program.  Traveling abroad is uncommon at community colleges so I recognized quite a golden opportunity to finally travel overseas.  A requirement of the course was to keep a journal of every day we were in Turkey  logging our day to day activities and making cultural and personal observations.  My journal was a simple composition notebook with the good old fashioned black and white cover.  It felt nice revisiting the memories of being a little younger and traveling in an exotic country with fine mates to make the whole thing loads of fun.  I was reminded of people who's faces have been filed away in some dusty, dark sulcus in my head.  Ah ha!  This is why they wanted us to journal.  Our memories are selective--we forget so easily and what gets remembered gets washed thoroughly by our sub conscience censor so as to be congruent with our sensibilities and needs.  When we read our journals though, we have an opportunity to see through the eyes of our former selves, jolting to life amnesic memories and if we're lucky, seeing how much differently we think and feel in the present.  As I read the pages of sloppy cursive, I was struck by the preoccupations of the content.  Ninety percent of all I wrote was pertaining to the new relationship I had just entered in to prior to the trip.  With all due respect to the feelings of the young man writing that journal, a lot of what he had to say struck me as naive and silly.  To think--there he was, walking the streets of the ancient world where Christian and Muslim cultures collided.  The Greeks, Romans, Ottomans, Egyptians, Seljuks.....their arts, their influence, could be seen everywhere.  All of this culture and history, and the adventure of the whole trip--being transplanted from his ordinary, routine, life in Delaware to Istanbul!  My writings were predominately about the obsessive, lusty, puppy-dog love I felt for a gal back home (who I'm happy to say is a good friend now.)  I managed to write a little bit about Turkish culture, and about the colorful group of people with whom I traveled.  All in all though--it wasn't enough.  As I read that journal now it strikes me how much more interesting it is reading about what I did in Turkey than about how I felt in a relationship.  The moral that I'm taking away from today is to make a point to write about the places I am visiting and the people I am meeting.  Become an expert observer and write, write, write!  And while observing my own feelings and commentating on relationships is useful and important, I know that it is important to detail profound experiences of education, culture, and travel, because feelings regarding this arena will most likely not change so much as those surrounding relationships.